Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 442

Flute Loops (MP3)

Like yesterday’s track, today’s is a sketch, and it involves looping, and the source instrument is one from a pre-electronic era. Yesterday that instrument was a guitar. Today it’s a flute. The track is a one-minute experiment by Margaret “Margot” Collins, who posts as Margonaut at SoundCloud.com. The piece layers a variety of flute material — lush sound beds, pizzicato piping, melodic and rhythmic fragments — into a gently pulsing lull. What pulls it all together is that the ever intensifying incremental developments build both a sense of density and a sense of stasis — it’s as if as the track increases one sort of momentum, it actively loses another.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/margonaut. More from Collins at alwaysadapting.com

Guitar Loop (MP3)

The artist known as Toaster has uploaded a lovely swath of guitar-looping ambience whose title, “Unreasonable Sketch,” suggests the presence of a tension that the track pleasantly refuses to oblige. The foundation of it is a deep, undulating lull of hazy layering. What makes it a sketch is hinted at as it proceeds, as the sinuous audio gives way to a melodic strain — not the light strumming that came early on, but a more pointed, singular sound, less like a guitar, and more like a single finger on an old keyboard synthesizer making a hesitant push toward a proper lead line. It comes on so slowly, so absent of eagerness, that the ear might not even notice it until the element is fairly far along. The track inevitably fades out, which is the nature of instrumental sketches. It will be interesting to hear where Toaster takes this.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/toaster-1. More from Toaster, aka Todd Elliott of San Jose, California, at twitter.com/toddbert and toaster.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0085: 3 Parts

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 15, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 19, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0085: 3 Parts

This week’s project is fairly open-ended. It involves making a simple song, and just three directions are involved.

The goal is to make a song with three parts: (1) beat, (2) background sound bed, and (3) melody.

You will make the beat with an oscillator.

You will make the background sound bed with a drum machine.

You will make the melody with a field recording.

Note: Software versions or equivalents of the oscillator and the drum machine are certainly allowed, and you can process any of the material, so long as the final heard audio bears a recognizable resemblance to the source audio.

Deadline: Monday, August 19, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between 1 and 3 minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0085-3parts” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 85th Disquiet Junto project, in which a song is made with three simple parts (oscillator, drum machine, field recording), at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/08/15/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Image found via wikimedia.org.

Disquiet Junto Project 0084: Quotidian Thread

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 8, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 12, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0084: Quotidian Thread

This week’s project involves field recordings. It entails the process of connecting two brief recordings of everyday sound. The connection is made by locating an element within each of the two recordings, and then creating a transition from one to the next. The finished track should be a maximum of 60 seconds long. As always, it is greatly appreciated if you can describe your decision-making in the text that accompanies your uploaded track.

The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Record two brief field recordings. One should be fairly noisy and the other relatively quiet.

Step 2: Listen closely to both recordings and locate a useful 10-second segment in each. Trim the two 10-second segments.

Step 3: Listen closely to the fairly noisy 10-second segment, and in it locate a single sound that is prominent enough to be isolated.

Step 4: Listen closely to the relatively quiet 10-second segment, and in it locate a single sound that is prominent enough to be isolated.

Step 5: Develop an original composition that is structured as follows: The first 10 seconds are of the noisy field recording. During the final second, the noisy field recording should slowly fade out. As it fades, the one sound you have elected to isolate in Step 3 should continue playing. After the rest of the recording has faded away entirely, that one isolated sound from Step 3 should slowly transform into the sound that you elected to isolate in step 4. Once the transition from the Step 3 isolate to the Step 4 isolate is complete, you should fade in the 10-segment of the relatively quiet field recording.

Step 6: You are now done.

Deadline: Monday, August 11, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between 30 and 60 seconds.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0084-quotidianthread” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 84th Disquiet Junto project, in which two distinct field recordings are connected through a transition between isolated elements, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/08/08/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

The Hauntology of Daily Life (at Medium.com)

I am taking a bit of a midsummer rest here at Disquiet.com. There will be occasional posts throughout August, especially on Thursdays, when new Disquiet Junto projects go live.

Which is not to say I’m not busy. I just posted my first piece at the Medium.com service. It is titled “The Hauntology of Daily Life.” It is about China Miéville being stuck on a loop in my backyard, and how sounds can be rooted in place, and how memories are made.

This is the full text:

“The Hauntology of Daily Life”

Or, why China Miéville has, for years, been stuck in my backyard retelling the same story

A certain new, wifi-less café is situated across the street from a certain longtime dry cleaner in my neighborhood. I know this because I went to the dry cleaner to deal belatedly with some food-stained sweaters, and noticed the relative proximity as I made my approach by foot. I knew the café was somewhere around there, but had not yet connected that the two businesses were so close to one another. Needing to next head to a café to accomplish some work, I decided on this nearby one, despite having never entered it before, rather than my regular café, which is several blocks further down the road.

I made this decision while the dry cleaner’s proprietor, wearing his standard short white gloves of the thinnest imaginable cotton fabric, registered my drop-off by ticking away at his countertop touchscreen computer with the eraser of a long yellow pencil that has never been, and will never be, anywhere near a pencil sharpener. The tick of his touchscreen has a specific sound, a tight punch of a signal, that I associate solely with this dry cleaner. I do not visit the dry cleaner often, but when I do, I look forward to the touchscreen tick just as much as I do to the idea that my sweaters might soon have fewer spots on them.

Having deposited the sweaters and retrieved a yellow receipt so bright in color that it is impossible to lose in even the most overburdened wallet, I headed to the new café for two reasons: I had been meaning to check it out, and walking the additional handful or so of blocks to my regular café felt more like procrastination than exercise. As it turned out, the new café’s strident lack of Internet connectivity helped nudge me along during the current stage of a particular project, and I will almost certainly return there in the near future, even if all my sweaters are clean.

Next time I need to go to the café, I will know exactly where it is, just as I know that another café that I frequent is across the street — one block closer to the Pacific ocean — from a dim sum place I eat lunch at frequently, and just as I know that a favorite Vietnamese restaurant is on the same block as the movie theater that is closest to my home. I could not tell you the cross streets of any of these businesses, but I know where they all are in relation to each other. That is how memories are cemented. At least that is how my brain makes memories, through context, correlation, proximity.

And through incidence. There are different types of proximity, and though the word suggests physical nearness, there is also simply chance incident. On the way to the dim sum restaurant, there is a spot where I think about feathers, because a dead bird was left there for several weeks, and for weeks after its carcass had disappeared, individual feathers fluttered in the bushes and grass.

Key for my memory is sound, certain parallels between physical places and the sounds that I associate with them.

I do not think of alarms when I walk past the neighborhood fire station, but I do think about the crying in a nursery ward. This is because of a sign on the firehouse door that announces the place as a safe haven for unwanted newborns. The sign shows a child sleeping in a pair of hands, yet I cannot walk by that firehouse without the helpless calls of infants ringing in my mind’s ears.

There is a stretch of road between Pasadena and Glendale where I will always hear the rhythmic threadbare minimal techno of Monolake’s album Cinemascope, even if Led Zeppelin is blasting on the radio,even if I am deep in conversation on the phone or with a fellow passenger, even if the windows are open and letting in the sirens of passing police cars, all of which has happened. More than a decade ago, on a visit to the Los Angeles area, I blasted a CD of that album in a rental car after a long day of meetings, on my way to visit a friend across town, and though I have never again sat in that particular car, and I have long since parted ways with that employer, and my physical copy of the Monolake album is buried in a box in my closet, the music still hovers on the highway, waiting for me to trigger it simply by driving through it.

And I cannot step into a particular corner of my home’s small backyard without having the novelist China Miéville tell me a story — more specifically, tell me a particular part of a story. For at some point, many years ago, I struggled in that spot with a heavy ration of weeds, and while I pulled at the weeds, tried to separate them from the ground without leaving their crepuscular roots intact, a recording of Miéville reading from one of his stories played through the headphones attached to my MP3 player. I was fixed in that spot long enough for the story to take root. It is as if the story lingers there, set on a loop on an invisible jukebox, and I can access it if I get just inside a specific zone of the yard.

The piece also resides at medium.com.

American Soil (MP3)

One of the best reasons to read foreign news sources is to get a sense of the world beyond one’s own borders — by which is meant both the official lines of geographic demarcation, and the manner in which cultural norms lead to a self-selected understanding of reality, of life. To read about, say, the Grand Canyon in a Swedish newspaper’s travel section is to have a very different view of it than from, say, Sunset magazine, which considers the national monument to be part of its backyard. This sense of perspective is as true of everyday objects and events as it is of national treasures. And it is true of the news, as when the field recording catalog that is the great Touch Radio podcast series, which is based out of Britain, adds a recording of protests in Hollywood, all chanting and helicopter whirs and drumming and honking and, still, some birdsong (MP3).

Download audio file (Radio97.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk.

Sound of Sound of Art (MP3)

Rampant drumming. Cavernous echo. Murmuring crowd. Determined footsteps. Rising voices. Security pings. Hushed commentary. These are the things a museum is made of — or at least its sound environment. The audio comes courtesy of John Kannenberg, a musician and sound artist who often takes the space in which art is displayed as his starting point.

He describes the recording as follows:

This 3-minute teaser contains sounds recorded in June and July of 2013 as source material for my in-progress composition “A Sound Map of the Art Institute of Chicago.”

The best — or at least most remarkably well-timed — moment is when what appears to be a docent can be overheard describing synesthesia, how one can hear colors and smell sensation, and so on. Little did she know her spoken words would take on a new, unintended artistic purpose, themselves transformed from commentary on art to an artful commentary on commentary on art.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/johnkannenberg. More from Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0083: R#d#ct#d

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 1, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 5, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0083: R#d#ct#d

This week’s project is an open-ended exploration of surveillance and graphic notation.

The page at the following URL is the score that you will perform:

http://goo.gl/eYX80X

You can use any instrumentation you choose, just no source audio for which you cannot yourself claim ownership or fair use.

Background: The image is page 8 of recently declassified documents related to NSA collection of telephone metadata records.

Deadline: Monday, August 5, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between two and five minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0083-redacted” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 83rd Disquiet Junto project, in which a page from recently declassified documents related to NSA collection of telephone metadata records is treated as a graphically notated score, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/08/01/disqui...

Image found via twitter.com/shearm and twitter.com/glennf.

Full document at:

http://goo.gl/wVydxR

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Listening Versus Paying Attention (MP3)

The second in the monthly Ora podcast/broadcast by Daniela Cascella and Salomé Voegelin has been posted online. Cascella (author of En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing) and Voegelin (author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art) discuss topics ranging from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening to the sound-sensitive films of director Andrei Tarkovsky, but what distinguishes it isn’t so much the variety of subjects as the heavily nuanced conversation. Cascella and Voegelin prod each other from each question and observation to the next, digging into minute distinctions, and drawing from literature and personal experience even more than from recorded sound. One particularly interesting aspect of this entry is how they upend the commonly held distinction between hearing and listening. Traditionally it is understood that to hear is simply to be aware of sound, while to listen is to pay attention. What Cascella and Voegelin work to in their discussion is how since the act of listening involves a personal engagement with the material, that in turn means that it involves invoked associations, ruminations, considerations, invocations — and, thus, listening is far more than a matter of paying attention. If anything, to listen is to not pay attention, but to disappear into one’s own internal codex of meaning and memory (MP3).

Download audio file (ora2_17-07-13.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at ora2013. The show was originally broadcast on July 25 on Resonance FM. More on Cascella at danielacascella.com and at salomevoegelin.net.

Sublimated Shoegazing

Another thick mass of deeply sublimated tape noise has emanated from the
excellent soundcloud.com/turmericmagnitudes account, based in San Francisco. The 10-plus–minute “Black Thread – Crude Shrine” (Black Thread being the act, “Crude Shrine” the song) sounds like someone is playing a My Bloody Valentine album that’s been recorded at half speed over and over on the same cassette until it makes Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” seem like an audiophile’s stereo-system dynamic-range test track by comparison. The whorl of deeply punished pop melodicism increases as it proceeds, until what could very well be a rough wave carries it out to sea.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/turmericmagnitudes. More from Black Thread at soundcloud.com/blackthread.